How a Rockford graduate reached out to depressed teens on YouTube after 'worst year of his life' (Tom Rademacher column)

Rockford High School graduate and Michigan State University freshman Jacob Schemmel in a scene from his popular YouTube video.

It’s titled, simply, “My Story.”

But I’m dubbing it “Jake’s Promise,” a YouTube gone viral, the product of a young man from West Michigan whose seven-minute video is, by numerous accounts, doing a lot more than generating hits.

It’s saving lives.

Jake is Jacob Schemmel, and he doesn’t have a degree or any formal training in social work or psychology. He’s six-foot-something of blond hair and grins, an 18-year-old freshman at Michigan State University.

He’s also a kid I’ve known since he was 7 or 8 years old. He became a good friend of our youngest son Andrew — of our entire family — when both were in fourth grade. He’s played basketball and swam on the same teams as Andrew. He’s slept over at our house, played video games, watched sports, and on more than one occasion, drunk us dry of Crystal Light.

I’ve suspected for a long time he had a special sort of inner strength, but I was drawn to tears in realizing just how deep his moxie goes after viewing his YouTube submission. It chronicles the year 2010, his senior year at Rockford High School, which should have been solely a time for celebration and anticipation.

Instead, it was the worst year of his life, and that’s the way the video begins, with Jake holding up index card after index card, informing viewers how he’d lost his grandpa, then a best friend to a horrible accident, nearly another to suicide, a third classmate to another accident. In the same year, he nearly lost his own life in a horrible boating mishap, in which his right arm was all but severed. He lost almost enough blood to die. I have never heard him complain about it.

As if to drive the video home, he received a text message from his older sister while filming it, informing him that the house in which he and his siblings had been raised, was being demolished.

In response to events that piled on during 2010, Jake says he grew depressed, admitting his eternal smile masked almost more strife than he could handle. At one point, he says, “I forgot what it felt like to be happy.”

He leaned on family and friends.

What he discovered?

That love wins.

And if you haven’t got any in your life, Jake says, you can have some of mine.

“God loves you, and he knows there is someone who loves you for who you are,” Jake writes on one card. “And if there is no one that will…

“I will.”

A moment later, he’s guaranteeing viewers — still using index cards — that “No matter how hard life gets, keep your head up and keep smiling.”

“It will get better,” he says.

“I promise you.”

Jake takes his inspiration specifically from classmate Stephen May, who died suddenly in 2010 as a senior at Rockford High. He lived by three simple words: “Everybody Love Everybody,” and there are scores of people walking around today with T-shirts emblazoned with that message in the acronym “ELE”. Proceeds from sales of an “ELE” t-shirt will go the Stephen May Humanitarian Scholarship Fund.

Jake not only wants to assure people that it can get better, but he invites a world hungry for love to contact him “If you ever need to talk,” saying “I’ll be more than glad…”

“God loves you,” he says at the film’s conclusion.

“And so do I.”

I phoned Jake at his MSU dorm room, and he was reeling from the fallout. The number of hits on YouTube was approaching 200,000. He’s had hundreds “friend” him on Facebook. Some want to meet. Others tell him they are in tears, that his simple, homespun message saved them from committing suicide.

Posts to YouTube bear it out: “I’m a 21-year-old guy who has tried suicide twice,” writes one, “… this touched my heart and made me cry.”

Others: “You don’t know how much I needed this.”

“You don’t know how many friends you have saved with this video.”

“You just made an impact on my life.”

Jake told me he’s trying to answer as many as he can. That, and paying attention to 14 college credits, with exams nigh. Jake’s father, Dave, was moved to tears upon viewing his son’s post. But after making sure Jake was OK, he was quick to remind him when he comes home to Rockford for winter break, “There’s still a snow shovel with your name on it.”

Along with the tens of thousands of encouraging comments on YouTube and Facebook, a few naysayers have surfaced. Jake’s trying to score a hot chick, they say. (He did get one offer of marriage). Or that he’s copycatting another post.